It can be useful to determine the health of web server applications so that appropriate action can be taken, such as having a network load balancer not send future requests to unhealthy web server applications. The health of web server applications is often determined using a simple network ping to the server. If the ping succeeds, then the web server and all its applications are deemed to be healthy. If the ping fails, then the web server and all its applications are deemed to be unhealthy.
In other implementations, the health of web server applications is determined using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) GET request. If a web server provides a successful response to the GET request, then the web server and all its applications are deemed to be healthy. If the web server does not provide a successful response to the GET request, then the web server and all its applications are deemed to be unhealthy. Some web server implementations send multiple HTTP GET requests with different uniform resource locators (URLs) to each server in a group to determine the health of web applications on those servers. In those implementations, a list of URLs to use in the GET requests are configured and updated by a network administrator.